#scienc

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#cycles #despair #emotion #fear #free-will

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them ↗

— William Lawrence Bragg

#science

Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#science

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#conscience

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#judgement-day #conscience

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#pain #conscience

I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#mathematics #science

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. ↗

— Mark Cantrell

#science-fiction #social-justice #totalitarian-system-mechanisms #unemployment #welfare

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. ↗

— Carl Safina

#environmentalism #nature #science #life

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation. ↗

— Chris Dee

#deus-ex-machina #dr-who #fantasy-genre #magic #science-fiction